Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 03:28:01 GMT
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<title>The Structure and Performance of Interpreters</title>
<h1>The Structure and Performance of Interpreters</h1>
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Romer, Lee, Voelker, Wolman, Wong, Baer, Bershad, and Levy,
<em>The Structure and Performance of Interpreters</em>, ASPLOS VII, to appear.
<p>
Abstract:
<p>
  Interpreted languages have become increasingly popular
  due to demands for rapid program development, ease of use,
  portability, and safety.  Beyond the general impression 
  that they are ``slow,'' however, little has been documented 
  about the performance of interpreters as a class of
  applications.
<p>
  This paper examines interpreter performance by measuring and
  analyzing interpreters from both software and hardware perspectives.
  As examples, we measure the MIPSI, Java, Perl, and Tcl interpreters
  running an array of micro and macro benchmarks on a DEC Alpha
  platform.  Our measurements of these interpreters relate performance
  to the complexity of the interpreter's virtual machine and
  demonstrate that native runtime libraries can play a key role in
  providing good performance.  From an architectural perspective, we
  show that interpreter performance is primarily a function of the
  interpreter itself and is relatively {\em independent} of the
  application being interpreted.  We also demonstrate that high-level
  interpreters' demands on processor resources are comparable
  to those of other complex compiled programs, such as gcc.  We
  conclude that interpreters, as a class of applications, do not
  currently motivate special hardware support for increased
  performance.
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<!WA0><a href="http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/romer/rocky/InterpreterS+P.ps">Download postscript</a>.<br>
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